St Helens makes major patient safety advances

Patients and staff at a north-west NHS Trust are starting to see the high-impact benefits of technology-enabled care after the introduction of early warning and alerting technology from Patientrack. The system is helping healthcare professionals across 55 wards at St Helens and Knowsley Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust quickly identify the sickest patients, and manage them in the most effective way possible, while also enabling more efficient care practices and so releasing staff time to care.

Patientrack is being used by a growing number of NHS hospitals in the UK, where nurses use the software to record vital signs observations. The system then automatically calculates a patient’s early warning score, and shows clinicians when signs of deterioration are present, enabling rapid intervention. Such intervention is crucial to help prevent a patient’s condition escalating, and requiring additional care. 

Following the introduction of Patientrack, St Helens and Knowsley has recorded a significant drop in the number of patients requiring higher levels of care. ‘High risk admissions’ to its critical care unit fell from over 10% of inpatients in 2015-16 to under 5% in the first half of 2016-17. It has also seen calls to its medical emergency team, which responds to patients in most need, fall by one-fifth.